yeah, i switched to google readers next artical booklet, and i don’t even bother with truncated feeds anymore, i just follow the link without even looking at the stupid short summary… or even knowing where i’m going to wind up (here for example)

Drives me nuts. I don’t even bother with the Strib’s feeds anymore. Speaking of local dining, I skip almost everything Chow & Again writes as a result of truncated feeds too.

I’m actually talking with a few other people that are still using truncated feeds on their sites and man, sometimes a very hard sell.

I think I’m missing something in your chain of events. I use Google Reader and I almost never click the article to visit the site. I could be wrong, but I don’t think just having more links to your site guarantees more visits. I feel guilty sometimes not visiting the sites, because I know I’m not really helping out their hit counts which is what companies they sell advertising space to are interested in. I know they can count my subscription probably, but does the site know when I read an article through a feed reader or not?

james, the theory here is that people reading through feeds are the most likely to link to you, but they won’t link to you if they give up on your truncated feed.

Feed based advertising is growing. We put ads in the Technology Evangelist feed. And the ads that are appropriate for that audience may be different from what you’ll find on the site itself since we know they’re loyal readers.

Sites using FeedBurner can track what’s read (actually, opened) and what’s clicked on among other things.

Ed,
Thanks for the Post! I have ONE rss feed that is truncated that i click daily. All my others, NO WAY!

I’m almost in agreement…

If you have truncated RSS feeds, then you can avoid the “wall of words” anti-pattern for information architecture. People like digestible info… that sometimes means bite-sized pieces.

Although they need to be used correctly… if you don’t have a good teaser people will skip your blog entirely.

I use truncated feeds sparingly to:

* avoid putting SPOILERS in my feeds
* avoid tons of bulky images
* bury the boring technical details
* put a “top 10″ list in the teaser, and the details for the 10 in the full post

Thank you for writing this post.

I believe strongly in full-feeds. I live in my feed reader. It is my newspaper.

I tolerate partial feeds from businesses only until I can find one that provides a full feed.

I don’t tolerate partial feeds from personal blogs.

While we’re on the topic, I sure love the embedded images and videos.

Please? Thank you!

Thanks again for writing this, Ed.

And thank you for your full feed!

I haven’t given up on all truncated feeds (e.g., several of Minneapolis’ neighborhood papers), but a story has to be really compelling for me to actually click through.

After reading your post I posed the question of truncated vs non-truncated feeds to my fellow developers with whom I help maintain a magazine’s site. Although links and blog chatter are wonderful benefits, the problem we would have is that it would open us up to having our content mirrored on aggregators in it’s entirety and there-by reduce the value of paid or trade-based syndication which is core to the business. I would presume that most newspapers and magazine have the same issue.

Good points, izi.

Here’s one way to address the mirroring and aggregation issue: put ads in the feed. Make it easy for people to republish your content with ads.

Of course, every situation’s different and there may be some good reasons for truncating feeds. My point here is that there is a cost that many publishers don’t seem to be considering.

Right on, brother! I read my feeds offline via GreatNews and there’s nothing more frustrating than reading three lines that pique your interest and having to click through when you don’t have an internet connection and can’t click through.

I’ll be blogging about this later. Thanks for the post.